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In mockery I have set A powerful emblem up, And sing it rhyme upon rhyme In mockery of a time Half dead at the top.

William Butler Yeats

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William Butler Yeats
Age: 73 †
Born: 1865
Born: June 13
Died: 1939
Died: January 28
Astrologer
Mystic
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Writer
Scrooby
Nottinghamshire
W. B. Yeats
William Yeats
W.B. Yeats
Dead
Powerful
Emblem
Half
Emblems
Upon
Symbolism
Time
Mockery
Towers
Rhyme
Sing

More quotes by William Butler Yeats

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God spreads the heavens above us like great wings, And gives a little round of deeds and days.
William Butler Yeats
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We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare, More substance in our enmities Than in our love
William Butler Yeats
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All men live in suffering I know as few can know, Whether they take the upper road Or stay content on the low.
William Butler Yeats
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I spit into the face of time that has transfigured me
William Butler Yeats
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When Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet his work by chance.
William Butler Yeats
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Chaunt in his ear delusions magical, That he may fight the horses of the sea. The Druids took them to their mystery, And chaunted for three days.
William Butler Yeats
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In dreams begins responsibility.
William Butler Yeats
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And God would bid His warfare cease, Saying all things were well And softly make a rosy peace, A peace of Heaven with Hell.
William Butler Yeats
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What if I bade you leave The cavern of the mind? There's better exercise In the sunlight and wind.
William Butler Yeats
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All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
William Butler Yeats
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The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy Of old the world on dreaming fed Gray Truth is now her painted toy.
William Butler Yeats
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When an immortal passion breathes in mortal clay Our hearts endure the scourge, the plaited thorns, the way Crowded with bitter faces, the wounds in palm and side, The vinegar-heavy sponge, the flowers by Kedron stream.
William Butler Yeats
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Somewhere beyond the curtain Of distorting days Lives that lonely thing That shone before these eyes Targeted, trod like Spring.
William Butler Yeats
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We cannot doubt that barbaric people receive such influences more visibly and obviously, and in all likelihood more easily and fully than we do, for our life in cities, which deafens or kills the passive meditative life, and our education that enlarges the separated, self-moving mind, have made our souls less sensitive.
William Butler Yeats
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The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor has the shoulder used all its might that an unbreakable gate has never strained.
William Butler Yeats
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All through the years of our youth Neither could have known Their own thought from the other's, We were so much at one.
William Butler Yeats
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The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
William Butler Yeats
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I went out to the hazelwood because a fire was in my head.
William Butler Yeats
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If Michael, leader of God's host When Heaven and Hell are met, Looked down on you from Heaven's door-post He would his deeds forget.
William Butler Yeats
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No man, even though he be Shakespeare, can write perfectly when his web is woven of threads that have been spun in many lands.
William Butler Yeats